Durham Estate

The estate sits on River Road in Flagstaff, with a river-frontage reserve behind the development giving residents access down toward the Waikato.

Rather than following raw contours or ruling lines across a plan, each section was crafted into a flat terraced landing: a level building platform set up for its own outlook, sun and privacy rather than competing with its neighbours for them. The internal streets, Durham Heights and The Rocks, follow the terraces.

Heartland engaged MSM Architects of Hamilton, today APG Architects, to masterplan the estate rather than handing the job to a surveyor. The plan of a community decides how it feels to live in for decades.

The masterplan set aside public reserve running toward the river and carried a consistent language through the estate: a titoki-lined entrance road, a working sundial roundabout large enough to stand as art, river-themed drainage swales, boulders brought up from Taumarunui and macrocarpa sleepers from the South Island.

The sundial roundabout is the estate in one object. The surveyor took it on as his own project: a cow trough with a cut-out mould, filled with concrete, and a metal dial made by Ian’s brother in his engineering workshop. Kiwi ingenuity, not something you buy off the shelf. The council accepted it as public art. The gates, for the most part, stay open. They were never about locking the place down, they set the tone and presence of the development, the sign that this is not a typical subdivision.

Durham Estate is gated, and the security matters to the people who chose it. But the quieter protection is the set of building requisites Heartland placed across the estate: standards for what could be built on each lot, so the quality set at subdivision carried through to every home that followed.

The requisites are why an estate finished in 2006 still presents the way its masterplan intended: every house built later had to meet the standard the early buyers paid for.

The estate’s design was recognised with an NZIA local award for architecture, credited to the masterplan by MSM Architects. Architecture awards usually go to buildings; this one went to the planning of land.

The estate sold out, and its homes have been built and lived in for close to two decades.